Investing in Curation. A Shared Path to Sustainability. Final RoadMap.

Investing in Curation. A Shared Path to Sustainability. Paul Stokes. The 4C project. March 9, 2015.
Digital curation involves managing, preserving and adding value to digital assets over their entire life cycle. Actively managing digital assets maximizes their value and reduces the risk of obsolescence. The costs of curation is a concern to stakeholders. The final version of the road map is now available; it starts with a focus on the costs of digital curation, but the ultimate goal is to change the way that all organizations manage their digital assets.

The vision: Cost modeling will be a part of the planning and management activities of all digital repositories.

• Identify the value of digital assets and make choices
• Value is an indirect economic determinant on the cost of curating an asset. The perception of value will affect the methods chosen and how much investment is required.
• Content owners should have clear policies regarding the scope of their collections, the type of assets sought, the preferred file formats.
• Establish value criteria for assets as a component of curation, understanding that certain types of assets can be re-generated or re-captured relatively easily, thereby avoiding curation costs
• Demand and choose more efficient systems
• Requirements for curation services should be specified according to accepted standards and best practices.
• More knowledgeable customers demanding better specified and standard functionality means that products can mature more quickly.
• Develop scalable services and infrastructure
• Organizations should aim to work smarter and be able to demonstrate the impact of their investments.
• Design digital curation as a sustainable service
• Effective digital curation requires active management throughout the whole lifecycle of a digital object.
• Curation should be undertaken with a stated purpose.
• Making curation a service further embeds the activity into the organization's normal business function.
• Make funding dependent on costing digital assets across the whole lifecycle
• Digital curation activity requires a flow of sufficient resources for the activity to proceed.
• Some digital assets may need to be preserved in perpetuity but others will have a much more predictable and shorter life-span.
• All stakeholders involved at any point in the curation lifecycle will need to understand their fiscal responsibilities for managing and curating the asset until such time that the asset is transferred to another steward in the lifecycle chain.
• Be collaborative and transparent to drive down costs
• Each organization is looking to realize a return on their investment.
• If those who provide digital curation services can be descriptive about their products and transparent about their pricing structures, this will enhance possible comparisons, drive competitiveness and lead the market to maturity.

Digital Preservation Matters.

Significance 2.0: a guide to assessing the significance of collection

Significance 2.0: a guide to assessing the significance of collections. Roslyn Russell, Kylie Winkworth. Collections Council of Australia Ltd. 2009.
This guide is for defining an adaptable method for determining significance across all collections in Australia. The intention is that it will improve collection decision-making in areas such as, preservation, access, and funding support. Regarding significance:

• We cannot keep everything forever. It is vital we make the best use of our scarce resources for collecting, conserving, documenting and digitising our collection materials.
• Significance is not an absolute state; it can change over time.  
• Collection custodians have a responsibility to consult communities and respect other views in constructing societal memory and identity. 
• It is vital to understand, respect and document the context of collection materials that shape collection materials.

Significance’ refers to the values and meanings that items and collections have for people and communities. Significance helps unlock the potential of collections, creating opportunities for
communities to understand, access and enjoy collections. Artistic, scientific and social or
spiritual values are the criteria or key values that help to express how and why an item or collection is significant. Part of the criteria are: provenance, rarity or representativeness, condition or completeness, and interpretive capacity. Significance assessment involves five main steps:

1. analysing an item or collection
2. researching its history, provenance and context
3. comparison with similar items
4. understanding its values by reference to the criteria
5. summarising its meanings and values in a statement of significance

 A statement of significance is a concise summary of the values, meaning and importance of an item
or collection. It is an argument about how and why an item or collection is of value. This should be reviewed as circumstances change.  Significance assessment is

• a process to help with good management of items and collections; 
• it is a collaborative process and consultation is essential.
• it will substantiate justify assessments objectively rather than subjectively

The process is:

1. Collate information about the history and development of the collection
2. Research the history, scope and themes of the collection
3. Consult knowledgeable people
4. Explore the context of the collection
5. Analyse and describe the condition of the collection
6. Compare the collection with similar collections
7. Identify related places and collections
8. Assess significance against the criteria
9. Write a statement of significance
10. List recommendations and actions

Significance assessment is only the first part of the significance process. Once an item or collection has been assessed as significant, there will be a range of actions to better manage the collections.
 

Digital Preservation Matters.

Quantifying and Valuing the Wellbeing Impacts of Culture and Sport.

Quantifying and Valuing the Wellbeing Impacts of Culture and Sport. Daniel Fujiwara, et al. UK Department for Culture, Media & Sport. April 2014. PDF

A study to develop the evidence base on the well-being impacts of cultural engagement that provides new evidence of the link between our policies and the social impacts of engagement in culture.This presents the results of an analysis of the association between culture, sport and measures of subjective well-being.

When allocating scarce public resources, we would ideally like to know the costs and benefits of different allocating decisions.

A significant association was also found between frequent library use and reported well being. Using libraries frequently was valued at £1,359 per person per year for library users, or £113 per person per month, the third highest value.
  

Digital Preservation Matters.

BYU professor leads the way in digitizing Victorian era literature.

BYU professor leads the way in digitizing Victorian era literature. Aaron Butler, Jaren Wilkey. BYU News Release. November 20, 2014.
The Victorian Short Fiction Project is a research venture to get students more involved in exploring the Victorian  literature in BYU's special collections library. The project wiki has nearly 200 transcribed stories in an online repository, viewed more than 150,000 times.

• “I wanted [the students] to experience the sense of discovery that comes from archival research and to sample literature beyond their anthology,”
• “The purpose of the project is the students. We are training the next generation of digital humanists — people who are trained in the humanities but see the potential of digital technology. The students’ electronic texts reach far beyond the classroom and will reside in a public space after the semester ends. One of the most important legacies we can pass on to our students is an understanding and appreciation of the strengths of both material and electronic texts. They will need to be stewards of both.”

Digital Preservation Matters.